Stop Debugging Broken URDFs Manually Add URDF Validation to GitHub Actions

#robotics #ros #github #devops

How to automatically validate URDF files in CI/CD using GitHub Actions and RoboInfra.

Every robotics developer eventually hits this problem:

A broken URDF gets merged into main.

Then:

Gazebo fails
MoveIt breaks
Isaac Sim import explodes
someone loses hours debugging XML

Traditional ROS workflows rely heavily on manual checking.

Modern software engineering solved this years ago with CI/CD.

So I built a GitHub Action that validates URDF and xacro files automatically on every PR.

The workflow

name: Validate URDF

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  validate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - uses: roboinfra/validate-urdf-action@v1
        with:
          api-key: ${{ secrets.ROBOINFRA_API_KEY }}
          file: urdf/robot.urdf